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Flash is shit in so many ways, I trust there's no need to write an essay here on that topic, it would be preaching to the choir.

On HTML5 video:

99.9% of Youtube is crap. Even the people that go there are the lowest of the low as witnessed by the Youtube comments, that place makes 4chan look like a civilized upperclass gentleman club.

No, yet another video of your cat skateboarding is not funny.

With Youtube being not useful at all, I haven't found any use for HTML5 video. inb4 porn.

There is no html5 video porn site. inb4 too much knowledge

Seriously for the 0.1% its worth it. Even though Youtube people are morons and don't allow monetized videos to be played via their website it works when someone embeds and its being used by many blogs etc. Vimeo which is more civilized sadly doesn't support .webm.

Html5 video isn't all rosy but i believe they ll fix the remaining quirks in the future.

Comment

Offtopic, but...
Youtube has so many videos that even with 99,9% "crap" you can still spend your whole time watching good videos there.

Just some examples you unfortunately won't see because you don't have neither a userscript that embeds videos so that an external media plugin can play them nor use one of the multitude of youtube downloaders.

Ontopic:
Unfortunately it seems today open source games are really falling behind commercial titles. Just look at skyrim where so many people complained about it being so console focussed that the graphics quality suffered so much and that it didn't make much use of the newer APIs like directx11. And still it is so much better than the open source games. It's a bit sad that there still is no well known and tested system to long-term fund open source games so several people can actually create an elaborate storyline and focus on map details...

Comment

It's occasionally useful to remind oneself how low can humanity go, lest one forgets that

@ChrisXY:
I do have a downloader script at hand for the one decent video per year. But it takes a lot to convince me that _your_ video is worth wasting time over among the cesspool of lolcats, attention whores, and people imitating the Dudesons. Wait, I think I just repeated myself thrice.

As for the content, there's exceedingly little to be gained from a video about most of the topics you mentioned. Reading is much better and faster for technical matters (Rpi) than waiting someone go "umm.. eh... now...", Intellectual Property likewise. If there's something there on a video that's not available in text elsewhere, well, their loss.

For music, why would you subject yourself to the bad quality there? It's heavily compressed AAC if I remember right, with clearly audible distortions even over standard computer speakers, not to mention any better set.

Comment

It's occasionally useful to remind oneself how low can humanity go, lest one forgets that

@ChrisXY:
I do have a downloader script at hand for the one decent video per year. But it takes a lot to convince me that _your_ video is worth wasting time over among the cesspool of lolcats, attention whores, and people imitating the Dudesons. Wait, I think I just repeated myself thrice.

As for the content, there's exceedingly little to be gained from a video about most of the topics you mentioned. Reading is much better and faster for technical matters (Rpi) than waiting someone go "umm.. eh... now...", Intellectual Property likewise. If there's something there on a video that's not available in text elsewhere, well, their loss.

For music, why would you subject yourself to the bad quality there? It's heavily compressed AAC if I remember right, with clearly audible distortions even over standard computer speakers, not to mention any better set.

Comment

Unfortunately it seems today open source games are really falling behind commercial titles. Just look at skyrim where so many people complained about it being so console focussed that the graphics quality suffered so much and that it didn't make much use of the newer APIs like directx11. And still it is so much better than the open source games. It's a bit sad that there still is no well known and tested system to long-term fund open source games so several people can actually create an elaborate storyline and focus on map details...

I brought this up in another section of the site for some research I was doing for a paper. Long story short, FOSS doesn't work for most game genres. The development methodologies that work so fantastically for Web browsers or email servers or kernels or so on do not work for an industry where 90% of the effort is in artistic content rather than technology. They don't work for an industry where the technology needs to go from zero to complete in 2-4 years _tops_ (and that time frame is shrinking, with 4 years being considered pretty ridiculous even for most $100m games) in order to stay cutting edge. It doesn't work for an industry where "release early, release often" means that potential consumers consume all of your content, story, secrets, and design years before the game is even in a playable released state and hence get bored and wander off long before you release. It doesn't work for individuals who value control over their artistic works rather than engineering principles of Freedom (it's relatively difficult to get most artists to sign off on the idea that anyone can take their work, modify it, and publicly release it -- even if credit is required, it's then scary that something they put heart and soul into could be modified to be vulgar, ugly, or offensive _and_ have their name attached to it).

There are classes of games where FOSS can work reasonably well. You see a lot of deathmatch FPS games in FOSS land particularly because the games are not ever completed, the same way that a compiler is not ever completed and always has something new to add. Multiplayer games of any kind work better with FOSS than single player for this reason. The other area that I'm convinced FOSS could do well at are smaller innovative indie-style games. Games like World of Goo, Legend of Grimrock, or Terraria were all huge hits, fantastic games in their own right, and made by very small teams in a very short amount of time.

What lacks then is experience and motivation, with those games being made by experienced game devs (the Grimrock folks in particular were industry vets) which simply don't exist in the FOSS community in any significant number right now (nobody goes from making good money to doing the same thing for free, and there are no companies like Red Hat or Canonical that are paying devs to make FOSS games), and the motivation coming from the millions of dollars those games made (again, split among a very small number of devs, with no publisher). Some iOS commercial games are literally pulling in millions of dollars for a _single developer_ for maybe 6-12 months of work. FOSS games do not have an obvious and easy revenue stream, which in turn removes motivation to make them; why make a game and give it away for free when I can make the same game and sell it and become a millionaire and never need to work for anyone but myself ever again?

If you want big content RPGs and story-driven action/adventure games -- things like Dragon Age, Red Dead Redemption, etc. -- then some things need to change in FOSS land. A reasonable revenue stream for FOSS games would need to be found. This precludes packaging them with distros, who are known for stripping revenue streams from individual upstream projects in favor of using their own. A unified installer framework (for the love of God, Linux needs this) would allow game developers to offer easy installers on their sites right next to big Donate buttons, or ask a user to enter a payment amount of their choice to get the precompiled binary (Humble Bundle style). There'd also need to be some good physically centralized places to find FOSS teams, since working together over the Internet keeps teams working at a fraction of the efficiency that working together allows, and that efficiency is needed to get games out the door before they become stale. Lastly, people would need to learn to accept that these games would most often be released as FOSS but would not be developed as FOSS because of the importance of keeping projects under wraps, both for marketing reasons (you publicly announce when you have something impressive to show and not a second before) and to keep player interest from waning before the game is even released.

It's worth noting that you will still _never_ be able to get some classes of games without ridiculous levels of capital (way far beyond what even the most successful Kickstarter ever has managed to acquire) simply because of the intense resource costs and the need for large teams of the most skilled developers around working for 60+ hours/week for months on end to get the technology working. Games like LA Noire with dozens of motion-and-voice-captured big-name professional actors, engines like UE4 (which btw is looking very nice, huge improvement over the pile of crap that was UE3 and earlier; too early to tell for sure but it looks like they fixed most major complaints game devs had with their core engine framework), coyrighted popular franchises like Batman in the Arkham series, infrastucture-heavy money sinks like popular MMOs, and so on. A community of hobbyists cannot build those today, the exact same way that a community of hobbyist film makers cannot make Avatar today, and a community of hobbyist engineers cannot create the USS Nimitz. There's just a point at which both the resource costs require a huge company's cash (which in return expects huge profits) and at which you require full-time top-notch people (who in return want/need to be paid for their hard work).

Outside of a few rare and unexpected gems, FOSS simply isn't going to be a hot bed of game development. The best use of FOSS is to be the repository for old games. Which I still think should be mandatory; release a game under a FOSS license 3-5 years after initial release. This is critical to ensuring that the cultural influences of games are preserved for generations of gamers, historians, and artists to come. (For one example, I can't for the freaking life of me get one of my most favorite games, Fallout New Vegas, to run on any of my computers anymore, because of its numerous bugs; the profits from that game are drying up very quickly, and releasing the source would allow folks like me to go in and surgically fix the game, allowing it to be playable with a minimum of fuss by others on continue to be supported on future popular gaming OSes, and would even allow ports to Linux or OS X or iOS or so on, in addition to being a huge boon to the modding community that keeps games like that alive and interesting to regular gamers.)